Introduction to Nuvaria
The ancients descended upon the world of Nuvaria in the infancy of civilization, advancing enough in science and magic to be like unto gods to whatever native peoples dotted its pristine lands. Bereft of resources after traversing the vast emptiness of space, these strange, alien newcomers quickly made of the new world their home. However, in their acquisition of plenty after the starvation of space, the seed of greed was planted amongst their kind; and soon whatever brotherly camaraderie had kept them close during their interstellar travels cracked, breaking into factions that bickered over power and policy. Poisoned politics embittered the species that had once been so close to one another, and in the fullness of time war arose, newfound nation against nation, city against city, and neighbor against neighbor. The very technology that had been their crowning achievement, their interplanetary lifeboat through space, now became their downfall, as the frisson of combative magics and strange machines changed the very color of the sky overhead. From the steaming ashes of a growing genocide was built a giant spire, centered where once had been the heart of the ancients’ arrival, their greatest city, now a glowing, grotesque monument to their ire, a twisted thing that drank in its power from the very night around it, until the fallout of such severe powers twisted the land irrevocably. It was with a resounding, ominous silence that the last of that ancient civilization fell. For some unknown time the cities lay empty, the sky steadily clearing of the last magical emissions, before the Babylonian-like tower twisted, tumbled, and fell with an eerily bestial roar. Cracked open, its stone arches ribbed like some strange beast, the ruin lay open and horribly empty. The ancients, such as they were, had ceased to exist, leaving behind nothing but ruins bespeaking their hands in its construction in every corner of Nuvaria and the remnants of magical pollution poisoning the land and whatever primitive fauna still lived after an era of destruction. Eventually, fear of angering the ghosts of ancients ebbed from the memory of the world, and where once the ruins were an object of fear, they instead became the subject of fascination. From the crumbling corpse of the ancients’ spire arose the fungal flowering of Numen, a town…and then a city, founded upon reckless curiosity and rife profiteering. What started as laughable shanties next to majestic historical stonework, arose immense towers built upon the greatness of ageless relics, and as the inquisitive-minded delved ever deeper into the strata of layered archaic homes and halls, a wondrous mineral was discovered. Word of it quickly spread past the boundaries of the city to the breadth of the continent. It wasn’t given a name by those who whispered of its power and worried at its consequences. Referred to as simply The Mineral. The Crystal. The Metal. It came in many forms, but one constant to it was the power it conferred to those who wore it and worked it. From it sprung the most fantastic of magics, the most amazing of tech. The most horrid of mutations. For like unto the forgotten civilization it sprung from, it contained within a poisonous seed, one that sprung within the unwary various alterations both uncanny and weird, birthing creatures out of dream and monsters out of nightmare. And now the current Numen sits upon the cusp of a new era. The Crystal has brought to it the whispering influence of the Ancients to the fore. Its society constantly sways and changes as people both human and other are drawn to the focal points of various powered homed behind its walls. Whether this city, still fledgling and childlike compared to those who came – and went – before, will fall to the same avarice, still remains to be seen.